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Margaret Thatcher was the worst Prime Minister in the last 100 years. Says who? A preposterous outfit calling itself the Historical Writers' Association have polled their members – few of whom are exactly household names, perhaps even in their own households – ahead of this month's Harrogate History Festival, and the majority of those polled – 24 per cent of them – have decided that Britain's first woman PM was also our worst, narrowly beating David Cameron (22 per cent) into second place, with Neville Chamberlain coming third (17 per cent).

Given the Leftist groupthink that suffocatingly permeates the commanding heights of our culture, it is no surprise that the three PMs most demonised in the poll are Tories. But oddly, the historical writers who have given Mrs T. the blackest spot are mainly women themselves. For Emma Darwin she "destroyed too many good things in society, and created too many bad ones". For historical novelist Catherine Hokin Thatcher "encouraged the worst behaviour across all aspects of society and we are still reaping her poisoned harvest", while Manda Scott accuses the Iron Lady of having "spawned a terrible lack of compassion at the heart of British politics".

These vapid, touchy-feely verdicts, so typical of bien pensant liberal British opinion, certainly demonstrates one thing for sure: that the Historical Writers' Association are profoundly ignorant of... well, history. For the vague charges that they level against Thatcher were not the responsibility of the woman herself, but the result of an irresistible social and political wind that was sweeping the whole world in the 1980s, the decade that she dominated in Britain.

It was the decade that saw the rolling back of the frontiers of nanny states the world over, not just in Britain. The collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and its east European satellites – actively encouraged but not caused by Mrs Thatcher – was merely the most dramatic example of the yearning of peoples in every continent to be free: to cast off the shackles of sclerotic state control and build their own futures away from the dead hand of bureaucrats everywhere.

The same liberating gale that blew down the Berlin wall, caused the Big Bang freeing up markets, and putting the possibility of prosperity before people who had never dared dream of it before. Yes, a few got obscenely rich as a result, and others demonstrated unlikeable Gordon Gecko "Greed is Good" attitudes. But many more bought their own houses, acquired shares in former state enterprises, and voted thrice in their droves for the woman who had helped make it happen.

Thatcher is also blamed by the Left for culling the huge dinosaur trade unions that had once bettered the conditions of the working class, but by the 1970s had themselves become reactionary Luddites, striking at the drop of a hat and making Britain Europe's laughing stock. Would even the Historical Writers' Association get misty eyed with nostalgia and long for the return of the three day week, Red Robbo and Arthur Scargill?

The Soviet bloc was not the only totalitarian dictatorship that Thatcher helped topple. By her resolute action in ordering the liberation of the Falkland Islands, invaded by Argentina's military junta, she ensured the destruction of that brutal dictatorship with the blood of up to 30,000 tortured and murdered victims on its hands. Do our leftie "Historical Writers" give her any credit for this? Of course they don't.

There are plenty of other candidates for the role of worst ever PM over the past century if the HWA would actually study a bit of History. How about HH Asquith, who spent his cabinet meetings scribbling drooling screeds full of state secrets to his mistress Venetia Stanley? Or Ramsay MacDonald, our first Labour PM who preferred the company of Duchesses to dustmen and summoned the hated Tories to deal with the great depression? At least Neville Chamberlain, who thought he could do business with Hitler, and went on thinking that until he was summarily deposed, is in the top three. But what about Anthony Eden, who began our disastrous record of invading Middle Eastern Countries? Or Heath, who took us into what is now the EU on the back of a big fat lie? Or Blair, or Brown? The list is quite a long one.

But perhaps Mrs Thatcher's greatest achievement is an intangible one. And it is one that still has our middle class Left frothing in impotent, futile hatred and rage a quarter of a century after her downfall. She made Britain feel proud of itself and stand tall in the world again after years of defeat, decay and decline. And that is something for which the HWA and their ilk will never forgive her.